Pine

Dear Parents/ Guardians,

I am going to greatly miss seeing and teaching your children face-to-face during the duration of the school being closed. Please know that your children are still at the forefront of my mind and I will do everything I can to support them and you, during this time.

My email address is pine@brooklandjm.herts.sch.uk

Please do not hesitate to contact me directly should you need anything, regardless of how small it may be. I will get back to you as soon as I possibly can. Please also use the email address to send me pictures of your child holding their home learning, great art work or models that they have made; I will do my best to place the pictures you send me on our class page for others to see.

I hope that today (Friday 20^st March 2020), is not the last day that I teach your wonderful children, but if it is, I just wanted to share a moment to tell you how proud I am of each and every one of them. From the day that they first came to me back in September, they have each grown to become confident, liberated but most importantly, caring individuals whom I am sure, make you beam with pride.

Lastly, I appreciate and thank you for your continuous support and look forward to hopefully continuing as normal when it is possible. Until then, stay safe.

Yours faithfully,

Miss C Clark

School Closure Work

Please find below some photographs of work that I have been sent by Pine Class during this absence. I am really impressed to see that there is a lot of hard work going into their learning, so well done Pine! You should all be really proud of yourselves. I would love to see photos of all the things you get up to, school closure work related or not, so please do send them through to me. I will continue to add to this if and when I receive more photo's. 

Miss Clark

Science: What do plants need to grow?

In Science this term, Pine Class are learning all about plants. As part of this unit, we wanted to find out what plants need to grow well, to do this we needed conduct an exploring and observing investigation.  We decided on an investigation question for example:

• What happens if a plant has no water?
• Can a plant grow in the dark?
• If a plant has no heat, will it still grow?

We made predictions in our book explaining what we think will happen throughout our investigation before planting our sunflower seeds in different conditions. 

Fairtrade Breakfast

During our Rights Respecting sessions this week and last, Pine Class have been learning about the importance of Fairtrade. Fairtrade is about better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers developing the world. We really enjoyed eating lots of Fairtrade items and in turn, appreciated where they had come from.

World Book Day 2020

We dressed up as characters from our favourite books for World Book Day. Each teacher in year three told us about books that they love and we completed lots of fun activities.

Feeling Good Week

Feeling Good Week is a Hertfordshire-wide event that encourages schools and the wider community to promote children and young people's emotional wellbeing by raising awareness of mental health and showing where support can be accessed within the community. Pine Class really enjoyed designing their stress buckets and filling them with lots of things that worry them whilst also writing solutions to these problems. After learning about the 5 ways to wellbeing, Pine Class are now better prepared to deal with their worries and how to recover from them.

Sedimentary Rock

In Science we are learning about rocks and soils. We have learnt that sedimentary rock is formed by small particles that settle, and become compressed, on the floor of oceans and other bodies of water. These small particles can be pieces of dead plants and animals, as well as faeces from living creatures. Don't worry, we didn't eat the models that we had made.

Human Bar Charts

Pine Class have loved learning about Bar Charts in Maths. We used our bodies to represent charts based on different hair colours within the class. This helped better our understanding of why bars may need to be the same, or different sizes. 

International Week- Brazilian Carnival Masks

In Pine Class we have been learning about Brazil, in particular, Rio Carnival. We have looked at the costumes worn by Brazilians during the carnival and noticed masks have lines of symmetry. After looking at many examples, we used paint, pompoms, sequins and other accessories to make our own masks including at least one line of symmetry!

Bones

In Science we looked at real bones. We drew detailed drawings of the bones and thought about the things that we already know and that we would like to know. Pine Class found that the spine the most interesting, it has many small bones that are joined together to allow us to move around.

Christmas Jumper Day

On Friday 13th December, it was wear your Christmas jumper day in aid of Save the Children.

Healthier Pizza Toasties

As part of our topic Science topic 'Food and Our Bodies' we made delicious pizza toasties. A healthy snack that we can easily make at home with adult help.

Egyptian Day

Our topic in the Autumn term was Ancient Egypt.  History off the Page came in to help us explore life in Ancient Egypt.  We took part in different activities in the morning including making ink, carving soap and shaping bread.  In the afternoon we prepared and served a feast for the king and queen and found out that Mrs Abraham was plotting against the king!  

Design & Technology: Replica Ancient Egyptian Musical Instruments

Pine Class designed and made musical instruments that are replicas of those played during the Ancient Egyptian period. The greatest challenge was joining the longer pieces together; we learnt how to reinforce the joins to add strength. 

Harvest Festival

Year 3 put together a Harvest celebration that we presented to our parents.  The children did an amazing job acting and singing and informing the school and parents about harvest.  We also collected food and donated it to a local women's refuge.  Well done Year 3!